Light Errant (18 page)

The bed creaked and dipped a little, as she joined me. She slid across to lie cosily, contentedly against me, so close her head shared my pillow though she had one of her own; and she said, “So does you being hung up over Laura mean you don't sleep with other girls, Ben? Benedict?”

After a silence, her hand touched my chest, light-fingered and dangerous. “Okay, two alternatives. You can pass out on me, if you like; or you can talk to me. You can't just lie there and stew, that's not an option.”

“Who told you I was, was hung up over Laura?”

“You all did, all three of you. I said, I can read you like a book.”

Oh, fuck...

I said nothing; she said, “Does it, though?”

“No. It doesn't...” At least it didn't, hundreds of miles from here. Left to myself, I'd have made no moves on anyone in this town; not now, emphatically, not tonight.

But I hadn't been left to myself, she wouldn't have it so. “Don't feel threatened,” she said, nestling, shifting an arm across my chest and touching my cheek with her fingers. “No means no, in this bed. But just think, I've been two nights now in here with a boy who doesn't love me for my body. Jon doesn't even have to say no, it's not a question. Have you got any idea how frustrating that is? And now there's you, and I know you have your priorities the right way round, and that's only going to make it worse if you just lie there and snore for what's left of the night...”

I'm no fool, I can spot a serious invitation wrapped up in facetiousness. I wasn't prepared to play, though, not on that level; so, “That's it, is it? You just want me to, what, service your needs? Like some fucking stud bull?”

I felt her chuckle, felt her suppress it sternly; heard not a trace of it in her voice as she said, “No, that's not it. Not just it. It's a good sleepy-time remedy for you, too. Better than lying there stewing, with a snoring girl on your shoulder. Besides, it's a good offer, and they're never that common. No one really gets enough. Why waste the chance?”

Janice: I've just puked my guts up, I must still be dizzy-drunk even if I don't feel it, it's only twenty-four hours since I was
beaten up by my dad even if I have recovered bloody quick, I've seen another of my cousins butchered this afternoon, I've just found out today that I'm still obsessed with the girl who's pregnant by my blood-brother; do you really think this is the ideal time to make a pass at me?

It was like a message in my head, I wanted to send it Western Union. But she was lying half on top of me, her breath moist on my neck and her skin sticky-warm on this hot night, and all the scents and touches of her were unexpected but for sure very much better than the couch and the bottles and the long long night; and everything in the message might be true but it seemed to me suddenly that it didn't after all necessarily demand the answer no. Maybe this was a perfect time, maybe I could lose it all for an hour. And then for a few hours more, sleeping as she'd said the sleep of the damned lucky...

I was dreadfully uncertain, though, about many things, and her motives were top of the list. Was this generosity, or curiosity, or what? There was gossip, I knew, about the benefits and revelations of sleeping with a Macallan man. Not to boast, but the experience was irrefutably different. Maybe that's what she was after. Or just another scalp and it didn't matter whose? Jon had said sleeping was a religion with her; maybe he'd been unnecessarily delicate, maybe he meant sleeping around?

Questions not voiced, impossible of asking. I went the other way instead, questioned my own potency. “Janice, I'm drunk, I don't feel good, I don't know if I can...”

Her fingers drummed a warning tattoo on my ribs. “I'll pretend I didn't hear that. You can say no, but you can't wimp out on me.”

“No threats, you said.”

“Merely an observation,” and she proved it, skin slipping over skin, hers over mine; and no, there wouldn't be a problem there, she wouldn't be left frustrated. “You going to turn me down, then?” she asked sweetly, pulling away with delicious timing; my arm moved way ahead of my thoughts, reaching to draw her close again.

“Janice...”

“Yes?”

“...Oh, fuck. I don't know.” More doubts, more unaskable questions:
is this kindness or pursuit of kudos, or do you really fancy me, or what?
was what they all boiled down to. I'd forgotten the terrors of insecurity, the years I'd been away; now here I was, home for barely more than twenty-four hours and pulling on discarded attitudes like a boy caught naked in a public place, grabbing at anything to cover his bits.

“You know,” she said, “a girl could begin to think you didn't fancy her.”

An echo of my own thought, except that she blatantly didn't mean it. No craven self-doubting for her. Even so the suggestion needed dealing with, it demanded a response. Actually, I thought, fancying someone was never much of an issue once you'd got or been brought this far, into bed in the dark; but that was not the point.

As she knew damn well, and she wasn't really offering me any choice at all. No might mean no, but there were ways and ways to gag a man from saying it.

Whatever.
What the hell
, I thought, and turned my head and kissed her. She tasted smoky from the thin fags she made herself, tight twists of paper round a pinch of tobacco; that was no hardship, I was well used to it. Continental girls smoke like crematoria and taste like Lapsang, like Laphroaig. Eventually. Once you've trained your tongue to think that way, think positive...

“If we roll around,” I said, “I'm going to be sick again.”

“No rolling,” she promised, and already her leg was slithering over mine, implicit instructions,
you lie still and leave the active stuff to me.

“And I might pass out yet,” I added, deliberately a beat too late. “You said I could, that was one of the alternatives...”

“Not any more, boy.”

o0o

And she had fingers and fingernails, muscles and teeth to ensure it; but she was gentle, mostly, laughingly respectful of my invalid status for as long as I remembered it, which was not long at all.

And afterwards we lay tightly tangled in the sweat-sodden sheet, lightly tangled with each other; and I think I murmured, “Fuck,” and I think she whispered, “What, again?” and I might even have managed a breath of “Later,” before I slid willingly into a thoughtless, dreamless dark.

o0o

I woke to daylight, a monstrous headache and a tugging sensation, which was Janice trying to unknot herself from the sheet and me. I did my best to help, but my leg was still sleeping where the rest of me was not; in the end she had to lift it for me, to work herself out from under.

“Sorry,” she said, laughing, hitching herself over to the far side of the bed.

“Doesn't matter. Where are you going?” The words were slurred, my mouth was furred and foul. “Come back.”

“I need a pee.”

“Unh.” So did I, but I wasn't doing anything about it. I stretched and groaned, feeling an ache in the hollows of my bones. “Come back after?”

 “Maybe,” she said, picking up her robe and slipping her arms into the sleeves, wrapping it around her. When she opened the door, though, we both heard voices, the clink of empty bottles being collected; and she said, “Maybe not,” which was fair enough in the circs. “Coffee?” she suggested in lieu.

“I guess. Yeah...”

o0o

The voices had been male, Jon and Jamie; I roused myself more quickly than I wanted to, carrying my hangover and a half-drunk mug through to the kitchen, hoping desperately that Laura would still be sleeping.

No such luck. She was there with Janice, with the lads; and they were laddish and conspiratorial, slipping me winks I didn't want, while she watched me neutrally from behind the shelter of a steaming cup of tea and talked exclusively to Janice, exclusively about being pregnant.

o0o

Coffee and Ibuprofen, juice and coffee and toast; we ran out of bread, inevitably. Jon went to buy more and came back to say that there was no news, no gossip on the street, nothing had happened overnight.

“So what do we do now?” Janice asked, looking at me.

It was Jamie who answered her. “Sort things out,” he said, also looking at me, as if I was some kind of hero
ex machina
, brought back to the city to do just that. “We've done it before.”

Yeah, right.
Thanks, Jamie.

To be sure, we'd done it before; and last time it had cost us all so much, and no way would it be any cheaper this time around.
Someone else's turn
, I wanted to shout at him. Actually I wanted to get on my bike and leave again, I wished I'd never come back in the first place.

But of course there wasn't anyone else, only we few, we happy few, we band of siblings. Heirs and graces, I thought we were; and the three graces could choose for themselves and I hoped they'd choose sensibly and stay the hell out of it, though that didn't seem likely, but Jamie and I were doomed by our blood as we always had been, and there could be no running away for either one of us.

How have you done it before?
was the question Janice conspicuously didn't ask, nor would I have expected her to. This was home, and not everything had changed. Gossip was currency, Macallan gossip was sterling; she'd have been brought well up to speed her first term here, her first week of her first term. And this last year of course she'd had Jonathan, with all his added kudos of knowing me; he'd have filled in the gaps for her, if any gaps there were.

But the only other question anyone could ask was,
how do we do it this time?
That one had us all stymied, we were all asking it of ourselves and no one brave enough to lay it on the table, for fear of getting no answer. So we sat and crunched yet more toast as Jon made it and laid it before us, in lieu of questions. I nursed my head just as Laura nursed her hidden baby, as Janice nursed her loudly-purring cat, each of us cupping gentle hands around our personal concerns. It was Jamie, perhaps for lack of anything to do with his big competent hands, who finally found a positive suggestion to offer. That it ran contrary to my own private hopes and probably his also was just the way things worked, the entirely contrary way the world was put together.
Life's a beach
, I thought bleakly, my mind spinning back only a couple of days to Spain, to sea and sand and a wholly different life.
Life's a beach
, I thought,
then you get melanoma.

“What we need,” Jamie said, “is information. Somebody's got to know where the hostages are being held. A lot of people, not just the ones who took them. The town's not that big, that you can hide half a dozen prisoners and not have anyone guess. We need to be out there sniffing around, asking questions. Only...”

Only Jamie and I, the two of us who were really involved here, we couldn't do that. We were known, we were the enemy; and even those who didn't know us would see easily what we were. A suntan and a couple of years' absence was no disguise for me, I carried my heritage too plainly stamped on my face, bred in my bone. Which left it to the others to be our spies, Laura and Janice and Jon. I couldn't ask them to risk that, and I was amazed that Jamie apparently could.

Not easily, he couldn't, that was clear; but Laura made it as easy as she could.

“Only you need us,” she said for him when he failed to say it for himself. “Of course you do. I'll go sniff around at the hospital, everybody knows my face there but I'm just another student, they don't know who I'm shacked up with. And they'll all be talking, with another body turned up. I'll just put on a white coat and listen in, no bother.”

“Okay, good. I'll come with, though, I'll just sit in the jeep and wait for you...”

“No, me,” I said instantly. “Daylight out there, remember?”

He glared at me, for the suggestion that I could protect his girl and his unborn child where he could not. I did my best to look neutral, and Laura just laughed at us both, the kind of laugh that's only one stage short of throwing things.

“Don't be stupid,” she said. “Neither one of you's coming, and we're certainly not taking the jeep. For one thing, it's back at the flat and one of your moron cousins will be watching it; for another, I said, I'm trying to be anonymous here. And one of you wants to sit outside the door in a jeep that you've been driving all your life, Jamie, with your big nose sticking over the windscreen sniffing for trouble? Do me a favour.”

Actually Jamie's nose was not so large by family standards, but this really wasn't the time for either one of us to point it out.

“You shouldn't go alone,” he said almost sulkily. “You're not that anonymous. 'Specially if you start asking questions.”

“She's not going alone,” Janice said. “I'll be with her. You and me, Laura, right? We'll do the hospital first, then try the police. I've got friends at court,” winking or possibly wincing at the pun, “they'll tell me if there's any rumours round the cells.”

“See?” Laura said to Jamie, triumphant. “All fixed, not a problem. And you two don't go playing boy racers while we're gone. You stay right here, where we can get you. You're our liaison. If there's a phone. Is there a phone?” She glanced at Janice, got a nod of confirmation. “Good. You stay, we call you.”

“You could call the mobile,” Jamie pointed out.

“Nuts. We're
taking
the mobile. Then you can call us too, if you need to.”

And she did, unclipping it from Jamie's belt without waiting for permission; and he just sat there and let her, and I didn't even try to keep myself from grinning.

o0o

So that was it, they had their plans and we not our marching but our sitting-still orders; and an onlooker might have thought we'd all forgotten that there were five of us in the room, Jonathan had been so thoroughly left out.